April 23, 2015

Ray Kurzweil made a startling prediction in 1999 that appears to be coming true.

He said by 2023 a $1,000 laptop would have the computing power and storage capacity of a human brain.

He also predicted that Moore’s law, which postulates that the processing capability of a computer doubles every 18 months, would apply for 60 years — until 2025 — giving way then to new paradigms of… read more

April 22, 2015

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil sees a remarkable century with autonomous vehicles transporting smarter, healthier persons to various destinations.

“We’re already smarter by the fact that we can access all of human knowledge with a few keystrokes. A kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more intelligent information than the President of the United States did 15 years ago,” said Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering since 2012.… read more

April 21, 2015

Autoblog — April 21, 2015 | Sebastian Blanco

Ray Kurzweil was the keynote at the 2015 SAE World Congress. His talk was a broad look at biotechnology and exponential growth.

Responding to a question on electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells, Kurzweil said that batteries have made modest progress, but have not seen the exponential growth that will bring radical transformation yet.

“Nanotech is 10-15 years away,” he said. And the big gains will be “when… read more

April 20, 2015

The Japan News — April 20, 2015 | Masakazu Yamazaki

The central figure in popularizing futurology is Ray Kurzweil. Despite accepting the biological transformation of humans in the future, Kurzweil does have a strong belief in the basic concept of humans and the human centric philosophy.

As long as Kurzweil observes things about the world outside the human race, he shows no signs of ambiguity. He cites historical facts and data. He has his own views about “who I… read more

April 12, 2015

Salon — April 12, 2015 | Chris Impey, PhD

The philosophical movement that forms an umbrella for cybernetics and cyborgs is called transhumanism.

Transhumanism is a worldwide cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to use technology to improve the human condition. Radical life extension is one aspect, as is the enhancement of physical and mental capabilities.

Two prominent transhumanists are Nick Bostrom, a University of Oxford philosopher who has assessed various risks to the long… read more